How to write an investor update

Now that you know about the importance of an investor update, let’s talk about how to do it properly:

What you SHOULD include:
✅ One sentence description of your company
✅ Key performance metrics that illustrate the company’s growth/progress (bonus points for using charts/graphs)
✅ Cash on hand, monthly burn, runway
✅ Monthly or quarterly milestones and your progress towards each
✅ Potential threats/blockers to achieving those milestones
✅ Brief product, sales, marketing, operations, team updates
✅ Shout outs to investors/advisors that helped you over the last month
✅ “Asks” of your investors

What you SHOULDN’T include:
❌ Vanity metrics that don’t impact quarterly milestones or KPIs
❌ “Feel good” announcements like LOIs, new-hire profiles, etc.
❌ Detailed spreadsheets that get too “in the weeds”

🚩🚩 One of the most common red flags I see from a founder’s investor update: Including *too much* information. The monthly investor update shouldn’t read like the 10Q of a publicly traded company.

This is a waste of time for the investors reading it and the founder who wrote it.

Investor updates should be short, direct, and informative. It should provide your investors with a 30,000-foot view of the company’s status in 5 minutes or less.

💡 Most Importantly 💡 — Consistency is key.

The story of your company’s progress isn’t told in a single update. It unfolds over months and months of updates.

Success comes in the form of lines, not dots.